NEO vs. CourseNetworking

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Introduction

This page is a detailed comparison between NEO and CourseNetworking, taking into consideration the features, functionality, and cost of each platform.

NEO is a world-class, award-winning learning management system (LMS) for schools and universities. NEO helps schools manage all classroom activities, such as creating and delivering educational content, assessing students, tracking their results, and promoting communication and collaboration between students and teachers/faculty.

CourseNetworking (CN) is an open source LMS for classroom learning and MOOC courses.

NEO School portal

User interface

The NEO interface is a modern, responsive design that looks sharp and automatically adjusts based on the type of device. It provides attractive tile-based dashboards for students, teachers and administrators, a graphical class catalog, as well as simple pop-out navigation. Many features can be enabled or disabled to suit young children through to college students. It provides rich content authoring as well as a visually attractive way to create and organize lesson material.

The CourseNetworking interface is not as intuitive and lacks many of the graphical and visual elements that are expected in a modern LMS. The user interface resembles Facebook, especially its main page news feed, user profiles, left navigation bar and top bar. The user interface is not customizable, and you can’t choose your own theme, color scheme, fonts, or terminology. CourseNetworking does not offer a customizable visitor portal where schools can display their classes, school information and calendar.

Organizations have the option to get a private CourseNetworking Channel to access customization options (logo, public page, billboard postings) for a subscription fee. There is no graphical catalog for displaying courses and no graphical dashboards for users. CourseNetworking has mobile apps for iOS and Android.

NEO Student dashboard

Ease of use

NEO is very intuitive and easy to use. In addition, it includes an online help center with videos, getting started guides, and searchable help content. NEO also has a rapid response support forum where staff members typically respond to questions within 15-30 minutes during business hours 24/5.

CourseNetworking is easy to use and has 24/7 help desk support and tutorials. It also offers user training and content creation services for CN channels (paid subscriptions).

CourseNetworking offers a smaller feature set and has a social media-based philosophy in almost everything. Their courses are mostly built around “tasks” and don’t have a typical layout of sequences of lessons with content and assessments. The configuration options per course are quite limited and there are many essential classroom functionalities missing.

Here is a list of the features included with NEO that are not supported by CourseNetworking:

User interface

Graphical dashboards

Graphical class catalog

Graphical resources catalog

Graphical lessons tiles

Support for more than 40 languages

Automatic translation of messages and forum posts

Windows Native App

Branded mobile apps

Customizable visitor portal

Content

Learning paths

Drip content

Micro learning

Adaptive learning

Mastery and competencies

Compliance

Printing PDF certificates

Class templates

Archiving courses

Waitlists

Seating charts

Class ratings and reviews

Assessment and analytics

Rubrics

Assignments such as debates, team, and attendance

Personalized assignments

Attendance tracking

Custom reports

Scheduled reports

Collaboration

Wikis

Forums

Chat

Blogs

Teams

Organizations

Integrations

Integration with 1,000+ apps via Zapier

Integration with your own email server

Google Drive

OneDrive

G Suite

Office 365

SIS

Panopto

GoToMeeting

GoToTraining

WebEx

Zoom

Skype for Business

iCal

Equella

Common Cartridge Format

Unicheck

LDAP

PayPal

Authorize.net

Stripe

PayUbiz

PayU Latam

MailChimp

Other

Trash can for restoring deleted content

Trash can for restoring deleted content

Terms and conditions

Archiving users

E-commerce functionality

SEO features

NEO Class catalog

Cost

NEO has a free plan and costs about $6 per student per year for its Small school plan and around $7 per student per year for its Enterprise plan. There are no setup fees, cancellation fees, storage fees, bandwidth fees, support fees, or other hidden costs.

CourseNetworking offers a free version of their platform, but for most essential features that schools need, there is a paid license. The paid private channel for licensed institutions offers full control over user account creation, campus wide analytics, the campus social network, and other functionalities.

NEO Class page

Summary

This presents a comparison of the most important features between NEO and CourseNetworking.

NEO is a more attractive LMS than CourseNetworking, offering a larger set of features suitable for both K-12 and Higher Education clients. In addition, it has a better user interface and more options for class creation and assignments.

Organizations that don't need LMS "power" features can choose the NEO free plan, which is beautiful, easy-to-use, and includes the core functionality of a modern LMS. Note that CourseNetworking does not provide a free plan for entire universities.

If you require additional information on NEO, please contact us at contact us.

Disclaimer

This comparison paper was written in April 2018 based on publicly available documentation on both vendors' sites. It was prepared as a guide and is not intended to be exhaustive. The comparison information is for guidance only and does not constitute any contractual representation, warranty or obligation on our part. Liability for errors, omissions or consequential loss is expressly disclaimed.

Since pricing and features can change rapidly, we do not represent that this information is up-to-date, and we encourage you to get the latest information directly from the vendor's web site. If you find any information in this comparison guide to be inaccurate, please contact us with details and we will correct the information within 72hrs.